Does your gym have a Yelp profile? First and foremost, if you don’t have one, go create one. You might not think it, but having a Yelp profile can really help your fitness business grow. Most people think Yelp is for restaurants and nail salon, not fitness businesses and gyms. However, when it comes down to it, your gym is a service business, just like a nail salon, massage studio or lawn-mowing company.

Enough chatter. Let’s get down to business. You’re here because you want to grow your fitness business and you’re wondering how Yelp can help increase sales. Below you’ll find three simple ways that using Yelp can help you get (or retain) more gym members.

Use Yelp Page to Boost Your SEO Results

There’s a lot of chatter about the SEO value of Yelp and other review websites. The general consensus is that yes, having a Yelp profile can help your business grow.

When someone searches for fitness business in your city on Google, you obviously want to be the first website that shows up. Almost all the clicks go to those top three search results. Google includes your gym’s social media profiles in their ranking of your website.

That said, if your business has an active Facebook page, Instagram, Yelp, etc, you’re going to boost your page-rank. Claim your Yelp business profile as soon as possible and start using it to your advantage. Work on generating authentic reviews for your business. If you’re trying to buy reviews for your business, you will get caught. With Google, it’s best to play by the rules and sleep soundly. If they think you’re gaming the system, they’ll punish you like they did to JCPenney.

Publish Reviews as Testimonials for Your Business

If you’ve generated some positives reviews for your gym or fitness business, you can start to use them as your testimonials. First you’ll need to build your review count. Don’t buy reviews and don’t plant fake reviews, you will get punished by Yelp. However, once you have a nice bunch of quality gym reviews, you can start embedding them on your gym’s website. There’s no better way to get more gym members and generate trust with potential new members than to show them quality testimonials from current members.

Communicate With Your Clients to Show Customer Support

When it comes to using Yelp to increase your gym’s business, you probably don’t want to follow Botto Bistro’s example. They were so fed up with getting shook down for money by Yelp that they started to give out 25% discounts to give them BAD reviews on Yelp. In all seriousness, when you have a Yelp account, you need to make sure that you’re responding to the good reviews and the bad reviews. If someone doesn’t like your gym, you need to reply quickly. This way, if someone else, a potential new gym member, is on your Yelp profile, they’ll see that you’re a professional business not worried about deal with negative reviews. If you avoid these negative reviews like some businesses do, you’re going to scare away potential new gym members by your lack of professionalism.

Image Credits:
Yelp